Episode 27: Biden

He's not just too old physically.

It's not just a matter of whether he's too old physically, whether he's too old cognitively.

He's too old politically because he's operating on this old-timey misogyny with which he is absolutely squandering the political salience of Dobbs and of the abortion question.

Hello, I'm Adrian Dobb.

And I'm Moira Donegan.

And whether we like it or not, we're in bid with the right.

So, Adrian, what are we talking about today?

So, today we're going to be talking about the president and the presidency and the state of both, I think, is my sense.

It's Joe Biden, his office, his campaign, its future, the state of Republican government in the United States.

And before we dig into it, Adrian, you've got some exciting news.

Yeah.

So my book's coming out in September, September 24th.

And I did want to let folks know that I'm looking to get people to pre-order this thing.

And as part of that effort, I was able to get some swag made.

Well, it's being made right now for the book.

And I wanted to let our listeners know first thing.

I don't quite know exactly when the swag is getting here, but it should be getting here pretty soon.

It's stickers, tote bags, that kind of thing.

And if you are interested in any of those things, including, by the way, stickers for this podcast, which we've had all this time, but just like haven't handed out, if you pre-order my book and you send a proof of that pre-order to the email address cancel.research at gmail.com, which is the throwaway account I made to subscribe to every right-wing

stack and newspaper for this book, but now it's coming in handy.

And you give me your address, I will send you some swag.

Adrian, what's the name of your book?

My book is called The Cancel Culture Panic.

And it is coming out with Stanford University Press.

And yes, you can pre-order it.

Well, you can pre-order it on Amazon, but like you can also pre-order it anywhere else.

As long as you can sort of document that in a way that doesn't seem totally fishy, you know, like a handwritten note from Steve or something like that.

I will send you some shit.

And I hope you like it.

I hope you like the book too.

Cancel culture.

The moral panic about moral panics.

That's right.

And there's nobody you want to hear about this more from than Adrian.

I've gotten to listen to him talk about this book and his research for it.

He actually wrote a version of the book in German and then rewrote it for an American audience.

So I think this should count as Adrian is having written two books.

Yeah.

At this point, probably.

And it's fascinating stuff.

There's nobody smarter on this than him.

So I think everybody should go order the cancel culture panic.

And pre-orders really, really help authors.

If you guys are not familiar, pre-orders are where it's at.

I mean, buy the books that you want to support in any way that you can get them, but pre-orders are really, really helpful and they make your favorite writers and podcast hosts look really good exactly so everybody please pre-order adrian's book speaking of making us look good we should probably also ask our listeners to rate and review us that's right on their favorite podcast platform which really helps people find the show we've gotten some really lovely nice feedback about the show yeah from our listeners we love both of you no i'm just kidding we love all of our listeners we know who you are

and it really makes me happy to realize that people actually listen to this thing that we spend time putting together and think about and have a lot of weird fun with.

So if you like the show, please go give us a rating and a nice review.

If you don't like the show, please, please don't.

Yeah, don't, just don't review it.

Some things are best between you and your priests.

And your dislike for bed with the ride would be one of those things.

All right.

Shall we start talking?

Joe Biden, Joseph Robinette.

Let's talk about Joe Biden.

Oh, my God.

So I should confess that fun fact about me, as we talked about before we started taping, I just got back from vacation.

And so I sort of tried to tune out of the U.S.

election as much as possible, which means I then consumed like, oh, what the fuck just happened?

Like clockwork orange style.

And let me tell you, it was rough.

Yeah, I had a

maybe like more sped up experience because I actually took

a couple days off and went up to Mendocino, about like two and a half, three hours north of California with a a friend of mine from college to just be in the wilderness.

It's absolutely gorgeous up there.

It's like pot farms and cults and the most beautiful views of the Pacific Ocean and the coast that you've ever seen.

And my editor was like, listen, I know that you're on a trip, but could you cover the debate for us at the Guardian?

Oh, God.

And I was like, sure, sure, sure, sure, sure, sure, sure.

Fine.

And I've covered a lot of debates, right?

And normally my post-debate recap column is: this didn't tell us anything we didn't already know.

It was a disgrace to the dignity of the Republic and to the office.

And look at how poorly behaved these imbecil like narcissists are.

That's sort of what I was preparing to write.

And I'm up in this little cabin upstate with my friend who's known me for like 15 years.

And

she starts making pasta for us to have dinner as I'm watching this.

And her like check-ins, like, how you doing become increasingly frantic as you like keep popping her head in from the kitchen of this Airbnb as I have like more and more of a panic attack because the debate was really really really bad for Joe Biden yeah you know I talked this a little bit with a friend of the show Jeet here of the nation on his podcast the time of monsters

And he really wanted to make the point that the substance of what Joe Biden said, what he managed to say, contained a lot of political malpractice.

And I agree.

And I hope we can get to that as well.

Yeah, especially on abortion, for instance.

Yes.

But the main thrust of the debate, for those of you who didn't watch it, is that Joe Biden was largely incoherent.

He was not merely inarticulate, as he kind of has long been and has famously been.

He really seemed incapable of forming a coherent sentence, let alone landing efficient and effective attacks on Donald Trump, who he argues and who I believe is a real threat to the Democratic governments of the country going forward, and who has been for some months now consistently leading him in polls and some of the polling that has come out in the subsequent two and a half weeks or so.

Or is it three weeks now?

It's two weeks, three weeks.

It feels like an eternity.

Yeah.

This two weeks following the debate, since we're recording, we are recording by the way on July 12th.

That's important to note.

Yeah.

Has really shown that after the debate performance, Donald Trump's lead is widening.

And now

you have a serious conversation happening in the Democratic Party over whether Joe Biden should continue to be the Democratic nominee.

That is really very directly the result of his debate performance.

It was not happening in any kind of serious or sustained way before.

He had no meaningful primary challenge.

this is something that occurred over an hour and a half of television that changed the race.

And so, we're here to sort of grapple with what's going on with Joe Biden, with his age, with the masculinity and domination politics that are presidential politics and presidential elections, especially as they play out on television, and to talk about the way that masculinity and the performance of of it might be shaping

our republic or what's left of it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, it's God, it's, and we should say, you know, you're going to hear analysis of this debate and this question on probably every podcast, but of course, we're really thinking about it through the lens of gender.

And it is really noticeable, right?

Like Biden's defense is to some extent just a masculinist posturing, it would seem to me, right?

Like it's the kind of, oh, come on, man, kind of moment from four years ago, just like repeated ad nauseum, it seems to me.

There is a not so faint kind of white male grievance politics sort of wrapped up in these kind of, I mean, I think Chris Matthews was saying something who like is like reliably the worst person in America, not named Trump.

But right, like he had this whole thing about like, he was passed over in 2016.

And then like, you know, so basically this guy has been shoveling shit all his life.

Like now you, you know, at the at the spry age of 81, you're trying to send him to pasture just because he has access to the nuclear codes, right?

And like this, this question of how men are allowed to age and what men are owed and what loyalty to kind of these paternal figures really looks like seems to be front and center.

Like this is a gendered pitch that we are witnessing from the kind of Biden loyalists within the Democratic Party.

And the other thing, of course, we're noticing, I think, and people have been pointing this out, is

that they're essentially cribbing the Trump playbook.

He's writing this out like Trump wrote out Access Hollywood.

This is basically the same bluster, hoping it'll blow over and hoping, frankly, that the base doesn't see what you saw, right?

Or doesn't acknowledge what they saw and what we all saw.

Don't believe your lying eyes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Which is, you know, this is something that we...

that we know the American people are capable of because they've been doing it with the previous president beautifully, who also, frankly, people are like, oh, oh, he's confused Putin and Zelensky.

It's like, Trump does that daily, right?

Like, and we've learned to look away from that, right?

So, but, but he's hoping to kind of very clearly benefit from that same effect now, too, which, you know, I have mixed feelings about, but I do, but I just want to analytically make the point: like, this is about a way in which in our GIR autocracy, we deal with masculinity in its wane.

Yeah, this is a situation in which Joe Biden has lost the capacity to convincingly perform masculine domination, right?

But he is still making claims on masculine prerogatives.

And this is, I think it's, you know, fair to point out all the operations of an incredibly sexist logic of power and the legitimacy of power that we don't have to endorse in order to describe, right?

But something that bugs me a little about people trying to compare Donald Trump's own like robustly evident mental unfitness for the presidency, mental and moral unfitness, is that Donald Trump has not lost the capacity for masculine domination demonstrations.

He is still able to be Borish and belligerent.

And, you know, you bring up the oh come on, man, moment from the first debate in 2020 when Biden was challenging Donald Trump, the incumbent.

And he

sort of got exasperated in this really kind of ridiculous shouting match on the debate stage.

And he goes, oh, will you shut up, man?

Right.

And I actually thought that was one of Joe Biden's most

effective moments as a politician, because what he did was he dominated the dominator, right?

He placed himself above Donald Trump and treated him with contempt.

And in so doing, he became like a ventroloquist stand-in for the American audience.

For everyone, yeah.

Everybody wants a chance to tell Donald Trump to shut the fuck up and everybody wants an opportunity to make it happen, or at least a lot of voters do, right?

And most of what Donald Trump does is make other people shut up, right?

Most of what he does is just sort of steamroll you with yelling and with non-sequiturs and with lies.

And so a debate with Donald Trump really is not a conversation.

Right.

And I think the extent to which Joe Biden was prepared for this debate two weeks ago, I think he was prepared for a conversation.

And that's not what it is.

It is a domination exercise.

Yeah.

And he could not perform.

He was not organized enough.

He was not cogent enough.

He was not articulate enough.

And frankly, he was not energetic enough.

So I think when we talk about the signs of Joe Biden's decline, about his loss of masculine status, there's a couple of different

strains or ways of thinking about the diminished performance that we saw in that debate, right?

One is

about these fears or allegations of cognitive decline, right?

There were a couple of pretty speculative articles in the Washington Post and the New York Times about people who think that perhaps Joe Biden has Parkinson's disease.

I didn't find those very convincing.

No.

And when he speaks at greater length, It is often possible to follow what he's saying, right?

We're speaking on a day where he just gave a solo news conference, his first in quite some time, at the NATO summit in DC last night.

It was sort of meant to be proof of life.

It's one of a few public appearances he has started doing in the wake of this debate to try and prove his cogency with sort of like mixed success.

And, you know, there were moments in that press conference where he was lucid and intelligent, right?

So I am not really as concerned with Joe Biden's intellectual fitness.

Right.

I think he knows what he believes, and I think a lot of what he believes is wrong.

But I am very concerned, much more concerned with his physical stamina and energy, which I think is like the other second part

of the decline that we saw.

I think he is exhausted.

He seems very tired all the time, and he cannot make a forceful case.

I think some of his, you know, verbal inarticulateness,

his

loss of his train of thought, I think some of that is not necessarily something we could classify as senility,

but maybe more like just, you know, the exhaustion of age.

Yeah.

There was a piece that I've been trying to find, and I haven't been able to, maybe you'll remember what this is.

I think it came out on Slate, where someone pointed out that, like, in the same way that a lot of people have pointed out that the relationship of America to the Access Hollywood tape

was

entirely shot through with their own familial relationships, right?

Like we, not all of us are familiar with someone like that in our family, but more Americans than not probably live with someone in their family who, you know, is a predator of some kind and whom they've made their peace with.

So this has like always been a part, I think, of

Trump's effectiveness is that people recognize the pathology, but want to push it away because

they're scared of having to reassess their own lives.

And this writer, and I wish I remember who this was, was making a similar case now for Biden, saying, look, it's obviously much sadder much more tender aspect but like we know what decline looks like and we know that yeah he's not senile this is not he does not have Alzheimer's probably right like but we know those moments of skipped beats from every single from our parents from our uncles from our aunts right like this is a reality we all live with which makes it so tricky on the one hand it's very hard for instance to talk to my own parents who are exactly joe biden's age about like i think that this guy should probably step aside because like,

you know, that's, that's kind of a final verdict on

their own biography and their own, you know, where they have gotten to in life's cycle.

But on the other hand, I also think it makes it really hard to tell the American people they didn't see what they saw, right?

Because we we may not have the perfect, like, right, like someone running around like, oh, did the Parkinson's doctor come to the White House?

Like, who gives a shit?

Like, probably, like, that's not what's happening here.

But we all know or have an an intuition of what is happening here because we

have seen it with every one of our relatives and we are afraid to see it in ourselves, right?

Like this is time.

These are the ravages of time.

And it's hard to tell people the thing that you universally know to be true about human life is miraculously not happening here, right?

Like this is a deeply human thing we're connecting with, meaning that like this isn't a bad debate performance, right?

This isn't a scandal.

This isn't a right, like the Republicans are going to try and make it into a scandal.

Like, who knew who knew what?

Like, who gives a shit?

No, like, we all know situations where we all thought maybe someone missed a step, be it an older colleague or a relative, right?

And we just kind of don't say anything, don't bat an eye, because like it's, it's fucking horrible to acknowledge what's happening, right?

That these people that are admirable and brilliant most of the time have moments where they're not, right?

Where Where things sort of are not clicking anymore.

But, like, by the same token, I think that makes it very, very hard to kind of, I mean, gaslighting is a strong word, but to kind of tell people, like, oh, this is just like the Access Hollywood tape.

This isn't.

It's in some way, unfortunately, far more tragic and definitive than that.

I mean, I think the Access Hollywood tape for the record should have been disqualifying.

I think part of what we have an obligation to do as citizens, as, you know, sisters, spouses,

human beings is reckon with these inconvenient realities in our personal lives.

Although I do agree with you, it's very painful precisely because it reminds people of the sort of event that would prompt them to have a conversation with their adult siblings, right?

Like, we need to take dad's car keys away.

He really can't be driving in this state anymore because he is not reliably alert, because he is not reliably energetic in the way that he needs to be to be endowed with the authority and independence that he has previously enjoyed.

And that's it's so sad.

But I think this also speaks to your point that I don't totally believe what has been suggested by some that this is

evidence of a conspiracy to hide the reality of Joe Biden's condition from the public.

I think this is probably something that has been a gradual decline.

He has visibly declined from the last time he was campaigning, right?

At which point he was already, you know, less energetic and prolific in his schedule than some of his competitors.

But it is a visible decline over the last four years.

But I fully believe that it has been slow and inconsistent because that's how such aging occurs.

Look, and Joe Biden was never Obama, right?

Like he was known for malapropisms and for confusion at the best of times, right?

Like this is why I don't buy this.

And I think, I also think that in some way, that is whatever ends up happening, a little bit of an insurance policy for the Democrats.

Because I think if the Republicans try to make this into a conspiracy story, it's not going to work.

Because I think people know exactly what they are looking at, right?

Like these, as you say, these almost imperceptible incremental things that the people closest to a person may not want to acknowledge themselves, right?

And you can say, okay, maybe you've been a little tougher on your boss.

Like, sure.

Is that a scandal?

Not sure it is, right?

Like, it's ultimately, you know, it's a pretty human thing to do.

I guess the thing that I don't quite,

the masculinity piece that for me is really interesting and really kind of

puzzling, I guess, even though I understand it, I think, but I still am puzzled by it, is the kind of Caesarism that you sort of now see coming out in the Biden camp.

That is to say,

like, I understand why he didn't sort of right after the debate sort of step aside and say, please meet your new president, Kamala Harris.

On the other hand, he does seem to genuinely believe that he's the only one who can beat Trump, when in fact, the numbers suggest that he's uniquely, and I mean, I think, what is that guy is substack everyone's reading now?

Etching Germanum makes the case that like he's actually uniquely poorly positioned, that he could really run a turnip with a, with a D in brackets behind their name and do slightly better.

So, so, but with this idea that he is, in fact, uniquely qualified to take on Trump, which may well have been been true in 2020, I guess.

But there is this kind of like real kind of bunker mentality, it seems, when we get to that point, right?

We say like, oh, we don't know whether he should drop out.

That's okay.

That's one thing.

But the other is like, there seem to be, and I mean, to be fair, the same media that are most pushing this will Joe Biden drop out discourse are the same that did butcher emails, you know, for all of 2016.

So I can see why people are a little bit leery.

On the other hand, it is kind of noticeable that people are really talking themselves into this kind of position where they think this is just sort of rat fuckery.

This is just, you know, this is just the kind of bump that you hit in a campaign and you have to just soldier on and soldier through, right?

And you have to stay on message and whatever.

Like, and

there's a kind of beltway rigidity there that I'm frankly a little bit shocked by.

I would have thought that the response would be a little bit more, it's more creative.

Yeah, you know, I think in 2020,

Biden's argument and basically his sole argument for himself was electability and inevitability, right?

He was the biggest fish in that pond or that pool of potential candidates.

He was the most famous.

He had the best name recognition.

He had, over his time as vice president under Barack Obama, developed a kind of like folk hero status, actually.

Yeah, Brandon.

Specifically because of his

generational disparity from the principal.

Yeah.

And specifically for

his tendency to gaffe, right?

He said things he was not supposed to say famously about his personal support for gay marriage before Obama was willing to stick his neck out on that issue.

And he.

This is a big fucking deal.

Yes, he was Uncle Joe, right?

That was the sort of affectionate nickname.

He was satirized in the onion.

Onion, yes.

Back when the onion used to be funny as this sort of jersey greaser kind of guy who was like always washing his trans am in the in the driveway or something like that.

Right.

Like he was kind of um clueless, a little de-classe,

but well-meaning in a way that was supposed to reflect well on him.

It was the Fons, basically, right?

Like it was Joe Biden's the Fons, basically.

It's like the Fonz has stumbled his way into the White House.

Yeah.

And he ran on something something like that, right?

Being like, I have a non-threatening persona that is intimately tied up in the fact that I am white and male that is able to allow me, a white male, to embody the principle of dignified pluralist Republican government in the face of the Trumpian autocratic threat.

I think that was always a little bit of a contradiction, right?

The idea that it really needs to be an old white guy

in order for women and non-white people to retain citizenship.

I think that was always a little bit of a contradiction in terms, right?

For you guys to be citizens at all, you need to be not in the biggest role because putting you in the biggest role will scare the electorate into backing authoritarianism.

I think that it always undermined itself a little bit, right?

Yeah.

Well, and a thing that I think intensified with 2022, which I think Biden read as a vindication of him, when in fact it's

about, as you say, people who have never held the presidency being highly mobilized by the Dobbs decision and other assorted atrocities, right?

Like, but it's very clear that Joe Biden interpreted this as like he was able to buck this trend.

It's like, well, no, women voters really bucked this trend and they happen to support you, which is good, but not sure you're the one who did the magic here, you know?

But he clearly thought he did.

Yeah, he thinks because he beat Trump once, that he is the only person who ever will be able to, which raises the question of what we're going to do when Joe Biden dies.

You know, what does he think is going to happen?

Because in his best case scenario, he seems to be seeing his own presidency as a restoration, right?

But the restoration of the American Republic from this like Trumpian anomaly in his worldview needs to be bolstered by keeping him in power seemingly forever, right?

Because he, you know, he is the only one, right?

And when there's only one figure who can preserve a republic, is that really quite a republic?

Right, right.

Is a question I would like to ask Joe Biden, but you know, he's not returning my call, which is also the thing that this keeps happening.

And I mean, this is kind of almost independent of gender, right?

Like, we had the RBG fiasco, we had Dan Feinstein here in California, right?

Like this idea that like these people have to hold on or else, right?

Like, is

just,

I don't, I mean, like, is, is that a generational thing?

Is every generation like this?

Or is it just that, you know, the Republic really is in crisis and that's why we're noticing these kinds of ego trips people go on?

But it is, you know, it's just manifestly untrue that, right?

If RBG had stepped down two years earlier and been replaced by, you know,

left-wing jurists, we'd be in a very different position right now.

It's not true that it had to be her.

You know,

things are working better without Diane Feinstein at the helm, I would say.

And similarly, the polling suggests that other Democrats can absolutely do, they're not much better than Joe Biden against Trump, but they're not worse necessarily.

So it's just this idea that like, as you say, like there is a,

how much of a Republican ethos, small R Republican ethos, is it really if it all ends up being tied up with personal rule?

right with like oh i must stay in charge or else the republic falls as you say like uh that's uh that's the king's two bodies uh that's a media that's medieval kingdom right what are we doing here right yeah i will say that you know this perentocratic delusions of personal exceptionalism is not unique to democratic politicians and like left-leaning figures it's also happening in the republican party mitch mcconnell would not leave his role as Republican Senate leader until after he appeared to have a number of, you know, neurological events.

Mini strokes.

Chuck Grassley, a sitting senator from the state of Iowa, is fully 90 years old.

Right.

And recently announced, I believe he's running for re-election this term.

I would have to set up.

Grassley 2024.

Why vote for a heartbeat?

This is not unique to Democratic politicians.

The objection to it does seem to be unique to Democratic voters, right?

This is something that the Republican electorate is not complaining about

because they have, I think, you know, firm enough grips on structural and institutional power that it doesn't really matter if somebody drops dead at an inconvenient time while they're occupying a very powerful office.

Right.

To them, it doesn't matter as much as it matters to us.

But I think also, you know, part of the reason it matters to the left much more than the right is because of what it speaks to about those in power's sort of appetite or lack thereof for Republican accountability.

Right.

And that is, you know, the fucking Republican voters don't give a shit about the integrity of the democratic process because, you know, the more authoritarian it is, the more often they achieve their own policy outcomes.

Exactly.

Whereas, you know, democracy is intimately bound up in policy outcomes for the left.

You know, I mean, the one place where the Republicans have not done this is the Supreme Court, right?

Like nominating all these

people

just straight out of the diapers, basically, to be like lifetime justices.

So there, I guess, it works a little bit differently.

And strategically retiring when they have a Republican president, you know,

Anthony Kennedy wasn't as old as

he could have been when he stepped down.

He stepped down under Trump because Trump was a Republican, because he had been appointed by a Republican, and because

figures in the Trump administration said, hey, we'll appoint, you know, Brett, your clerk, to replace you.

And he cut a deal and he left.

And, you know, you can really see MAGA enthusiasts Sam Alito and Clarence Thomas itching to retire.

It's part of why they are so eager to intervene in this election, which is another thing we should talk about they want to select the boss that will that will give them their exit interview yeah exactly the other thing of course is that like the idea that a gerontocracy

given maga's right like programmatic backwards looking this like it also just doesn't have as much to fear from gerontocracy gerontocracy does tend to i think preserve things and i think the difficulty right i mean like as you were pointing out like even if the sentences had been complete the complete flub on abortion in that debate was shocking, given that like that should have been one of the three big zingers of the night and

he couldn't do it.

And yeah, like, you know, if the last time you had a pregnancy scare was 50 years ago or 40 years ago, right?

Like it's going to be a little abstract, right?

Like, but it is a live issue to many, many people in this country.

And, you know, you might want someone who has like memories from the century of like any of that, right?

You know, not to be, not to be crude.

Yeah, or who might have a personal stake in it.

You know, I don't think that Joe Biden has ever been afraid that maybe he's pregnant.

Right.

And he definitely seems to understand

abortion

not as an issue of civil rights, of citizenship, of dignity,

but as an issue of like, at best, public health, at worst, a real like paternalistic,

condescending protection racket by which male authority figures can benevolently exercise their authority

over women who are not quite esteemed as adults.

You know, so, like, his answer on that abortion question

was that he preferred Rose's trimester framework, which has, in fact, not been good law since 1992, when the Supreme Court in Planned Parenthood versus Casey replaced Roe's trimester framework for states' rights to regulate abortion access with a viability standard and an undue burden test.

So he was operating off of 50-year-old understanding the law that had, in fact, not been good for about 32 years, but he was also understanding it in a really, you know, generationally sexist terms.

He was not imagining the average American citizen endowed with, you know, the rights and dignity of citizenship and a requirement for that citizenship to become meaningful through actionable freedom.

That citizen, in his mind, is a man, right?

He could not imagine an unintended pregnancy or an unwanted pregnancy as being something that implicated personal freedom in a way that the state might be interested in protecting.

And that was really, really evident when he talks about his fantasy of an abortion, like legally a permissible abortion, as being one in which I think think he said, you know, a woman could go to her doctor and he could decide whether she needed help or not, right?

So, A, the doctor is a man in this scenario.

Right.

You know, that joke about how, you know, the little boy comes in from a car accident and the doctor says, I can't treat this child.

He's my son.

And you're supposed to

imagine, like, but his father was also in the accident and you're supposed to like acknowledge your own child.

I know.

Apparently, when you tell this joke to kids now, they think that the child has two fathers.

They still can't imagine a woman doctor because of woke.

See,

they're so woke, but there's

like that joke would absolutely stun Joe Biden like a baby playing peekaboo.

You know, like he would not know where mommy went

in that scenario.

But also, he understands the abortion patient in his fantasy as a supplicant asking for mercy, not as an adult with dignity endowed with control over her own life.

And that's frankly the way that voters see it.

That's what drove the unexpectedly good blue turnout in 2022.

That is the issue that was handed to him on a silver platter.

Yeah.

And he is not just,

he's not just too old physically.

It's not just a matter of whether he's too old physically, whether he's too old cognitively.

He's too old politically.

Yeah.

Because he's operating on this old timey misogyny with which he is absolutely squandering the political salience of Dobbs and of the abortion question.

Yeah.

I mean, as you were already alluding to it, I guess the unspoken calculus that sort of the Biden dead-enders, I guess we could call them, will always sort of turn to is the idea that, well, there are a lot of voters who see it the same way and who would feel threatened by the alternative if we were to make an affirmative case for, you know, dignity and autonomy and biden is able to speak to these people and they're just gonna pack up their stuff and go home if we if we get rid of biden and i i do think that there's this this is just such a figure that repeats over and over again like that we must surrender to the very old and the very strange lest they set everything on fire right like the idea that like i don't know that a democrat who hates trump would after Dobbs, abandon the Democratic Party and vote for Trump because, let's say, a presidential candidate, Kamala Harris, was more affirmative and more strident, maybe, in her defense of abortion access rights, right?

It just strikes me as kind of fantastical.

It's ultimately, it's a story about like, you know, if we can't have this and no one can, right?

It's not, this isn't, this isn't the real, you're not getting anyone.

to cross the aisle on the abortion thing who likes jobs, right?

Like my mother-in-law is a huge anti-abortion nut, sorry, but like she, she's not going to vote for a Democrat, right?

It's just not going to happen.

But like there seems to still be this idea that like, oh, Biden's out-of-stepness actually is kind of a stroke of genius because it sort of like allows, it kind of gives an on-ramp to these older, wider voters.

And I mean, on some level, I get it, but on the other hand, like.

when you get into the nitty-gritty of it, it's like a really kind of shocking and

kind of to me, deeply implausible picture of what voters are really like.

Does that make sense?

Yes.

It is a Beltway fantasy that has animated a lot of Democratic strategists and politicians, most notably since 2016, but really going all the way back to like 1992 and Bill Clinton.

Right.

Of the most legitimate, most important voters

are these sort of like white

Midwestern social conservatives, right?

And that any kind kind of tack on these quote-unquote culture war issues, which is a very problematic classification, right?

To the left will necessarily alienate those people of whom it is imagined they are A, winnable, and B, so vast in numbers that they like really outnumber everybody you're alienating by throwing those civil rights issues under the bus.

It also is, I think, part of a racist fantasy that the white social conservative is a more legitimate American than say a coastal abortion patient or a homosexual it imagines their votes as you know sort of counting more or of granting more democratic legitimacy to a politician right but you're right it also imagines that they can be persuaded yeah or that they would abandon if they are already persuaded that they would abandon right if they let's say let's say they are not comfortable with your or my position on abortion, but they don't like Dobbs, right?

That they would switch over to Trump because, right?

Like it's hard to imagine that way, too.

I mean, here's the thing: it's also an idea of the American electorate that imagines that everybody's preferences and opinions are permanently set in stone, not just these people, but in fact, everyone, right?

Yeah.

Joe Biden, if he wanted to, could go out and rally an affirmative case

for abortion, not just as a,

unfortunate tragedy that we have to allow, even though it's so distasteful, which is sort of what he's been doing, especially with his almost near-exclusive focus on health emergencies,

but as a pillar of the dignity and equality of American citizenship.

He could make it a pillar of women's equality.

God knows there's been a lot of people doing that political work first.

He could give it legitimacy.

He could be on the stump.

He could be, dare I say it, changing some minds, right?

It assumes that everything's salience, the political salience of every issue is completely outside of his hand.

I don't think Joe Biden has either an intellectual

or an emotional or candidly, a physical capacity to make that kind of an energetic case.

I think Tamala Harris does.

And she's been doing a decent job.

That's why they keep.

putting her, passing the mic to her on this issue, because she is just more cogent on the most salient single issue in this election, or at least what was the most salient single issue on this election before that debate, which so now it's Biden's age, it's said.

But it is something where he clearly thinks there are set political realities that are A, unchangeable, B, discernible, and C, must be catered to at all costs.

Yeah, and I mean, it's not shocking he would think that because that's why he has the nomination, right?

In some way, he is one of those white voters that he's imagining, right?

Like, basically, it must be just so, and I must be the one to do this or else, right?

Like, why did Pelosi speak out?

Why does he say that?

Jerry has him aggressively and with, you know, a very thin veneer of plausible deniability.

But

Nancy Pelosi, I believe on Monday, went on a morning show and said, well, you know, he's got to make a choice soon.

This is after a week.

of Joe Biden and his dead enders really circling the wagon saying he's not dropping out, he's not dropping out, he's not dropping out.

After that very aggressive messaging, which Nancy pelosi did not miss she went on television and goes well he really has to decide whether he's going to drop out yeah

she was like she all but had the hook to pull him off the stage you know yeah but listen his case for himself in 2020 was i am the only i am the most electable right that was his case that has changed and i think it's really changed in the past two weeks yeah i think that's right there is a version of this transition right

that is dignified that is a passing of the baton, right?

Because in the end, like people like what Joe Biden has done.

A lot of people do, I think.

There is again a case that some pollsters have made that basically he himself is personally less popular than his policies because people are concerned about the age issue.

I don't, I mean, I'm not a, I don't read too much into polls, but like, but this is a thing that people have taken away from them.

So this idea that like, I will not run, but I will do my darndest to make sure that Kamala Harris is elected in my stead and does my second term for me, basically.

There could be a really beautiful kind of passing of the baton here.

And it's very clear that Biden World, what they've been doing, as you said, circling the wagons the last two weeks, is to make that impossible, right?

If he goes, it'll be because George Clooney and Nancy Pelosi dropkicked him off the stage.

Meaning.

It's this weird kind of sort of snake eating its own tail of white resentment politics, right?

Like it's creating the preconditions for them being like, well, not like that, you know, like

what they did to poor Joe Biden, right?

And it's like, this is the kind of awful choice he's putting before them, right?

He's like, there will not be a beautiful changing of the guard.

What you can do is a messy palace coup, and it'll make you look elitist.

It'll make you look out of touch.

It'll make you look like you're mean to the old white guy, right?

Like, that's your option, right?

And I'm like, is that what you want your legacy to be like?

To basically create one last kind of clint eastwood yelling at a chair style white gerontocratic grievance fest like it's also not i mean it's true that this has always been part of his political appeal but that's not how he's governed ultimately right like he he governed like he knew better than that and and it's really that to me has been kind of the most disappointing thing about this that there that you did kind of fall back onto this kind of style of masculinity that precisely doesn't say hey let's all sit down like i i understand people are upset by how this went.

I think I still got it, but like, why don't we all sit down and talk about this and figure out what a solution might be?

Right.

Like, that is the one that to them always seemed like defeat.

And so they're not going for that, right?

It has to be kind of like, you're going to have to drag me out of your kicking and screaming.

Yeah, he's poisoning the well, right?

Yeah.

It could have been,

he could have done a model of masculinity

of like dignified self-effacement, right?

He could say, like, look, I think I still got it what it takes.

I wouldn't have stayed in this job if I didn't think I still had it what it takes.

But the American people deserve to be 100% confident.

Yeah.

And this election matters too much.

This election matters more than one man, right?

He could have done a Cincinnatis style,

noble refusal of power.

He could have been like George Washington refusing to become a king, right?

Yeah.

There is a model for that.

Yeah.

And it would have allowed

the new nominee, who I think would basically have to have been Kamala Harris, although there's, you know, various other fantasies of Pete Boudig riding on a white horse like Fabio or something.

I don't think it's going to happen.

I think it's Kamala.

Well, he'll make a great Veep.

No, he wouldn't.

Or he looks like a male Selena Myers.

He looks like an elf, and I want to steal his lunch money.

Yeah, that is the vice president, if not the president's house elf.

But, you know, like Biden could have made this really classy.

Yeah.

But it would have meant

putting this aside, right?

Putting aside the ego, putting aside his sense of inferiority, which does seem to be quite acute.

I don't know how you manage to become the actual president and still have a chip on your soldier, but he's got it.

Well, so many of them have managed LBJ.

Trump, but he's decided not to be a dignified statesman.

He's decided to be an angry white man, right?

And that means that now either one of two things is going to happen.

Either Biden is going to stay in the race and he is going to face down his, as you put it, uniquely unfavorable odds against Donald Trump.

And he is going to carry the, you know, attached baggage of his age because you cannot tell people that they didn't see what they saw.

And he is now also going to carry the baggage of the entire country, knowing that he does not have the full backing of his party.

He looks weak.

He doesn't just look weak because he's so fucking old.

He looks weak because none of the people in the party that he is the nominal leader of believe in him.

They're all either, you know, 20 congresspeople and one senator have come forward publicly to say that they don't think he should run.

As of this recording, there will be more probably by the time this comes out.

But the rest of them are leaking like a tank, like a fish tank.

to every reporter they can find to say off the record, none of us think he should be running.

And that is going to be a stain on Biden.

And, you know,

it's long odds.

It's a very, very narrow path for him to beat this guy, let alone for him to beat this guy convincingly enough that he can then survive

the court and the House of Representatives.

Right.

Yeah.

So that's one option.

Or

Kamala Harris is going to get put on the ticket.

Biden is going to be dragged off kicking and screaming.

And it's going to be a Brutus election, right?

They're going to tag her as a traitor to him.

They're going to say she covered up for how senile he was and then she stabbed him in the back for her own ambition.

He is, him and his loyalists are probably going to be leaking Apple research about her because they are children, you know, and

they're not going to be behind her.

And she's going to appear tainted by his resentment and by his unwillingness to leave the ticket.

Like those are our options, right?

And that really makes Biden's term over the past four years look to me less like what he pitched it as, which is a restoration of the American Republic and more like an interregnum between a nascent and then a mature Trumpism.

Right.

Like this is not the restoration of a normal functioning democracy.

It is a time where the old order sort of revived a little before it was finally killed.

Because even if, you know, say somehow they pull it out and a Democrat is sworn in as the president next January, that is also a scenario that kind of merely delays the inevitable, right?

Because the constitutional crisis remains.

You've got a judiciary that's captured by Republican extremists.

You have an executive that they have really weakened, even as they have expanded.

the president's power to like straight up commit crimes.

They have really lessened his ability to make policy.

Murder is fine, regulation not.

Yes, exactly.

And you have a Congress that everybody knows doesn't do anything, right?

That is incapable of actual law and policy making.

So this is a constitutional crisis that is

much bigger than Joe Biden or Kamal Harris, or for that matter, Donald Trump, right?

We are lurching towards the failure of our form of government that this election itself cannot.

heal.

And Joe Biden is just, you know, throwing sand in the gears, making sure that this slide into authoritarianism happens as quickly as possible.

God, that's depressing.

I mean, nothing here is not depressing, but that is particularly depressing.

And I mean,

the way that like these institutions can be hijacked, right?

I mean, like, this is what this is, right?

Like, you have John Roberts kind of doing basically pirate shit with the court.

You've got Donald Trump who...

already kind of has indicated that he will not, you know, abide by any constitutional safeguards and that he has the enablers to make that possible.

But then you also have Joe Biden, who frankly, after miming

the institutionalist for four years, is showing his kind of like, you can either have me be the pilot of this plane or I'm going to crash in the goddamn mountain kind of thing.

And you're like,

shit, like that's not good if like all these, if all these institutions just kind of basically fuse with

sorry, but the narcissists that happen to like have fused with them, right?

Like this is, you know, I don't understand how anyone anyone who believes in strong institutions looks at that and thinks, right?

Like, why do we have political institutions if not to say, oh, the person who is doing the job seems to be no longer be totally up for it?

Let's talk about how we can get someone else in that job, right?

Like,

that's what, I mean, there are other reasons to get rid of kings, but that's a big one, right?

Like, oh, I'm sorry, our king thinks he's a horse.

So I think this war is going to go terribly.

He's like, no, you don't have to do that in a democracy.

But like, well, it turns out that like the heartbeat of octogenarians seems to be like the number one thing keeping our institutions going, and like, that's it's not a sign of not a sign of health, it seems to me.

No, and like, listen, I want to dwell very briefly before we wrap up on the fiction that Joe Biden and his campaign seem to want us to believe that that guy will be president at 86.

Right.

Like, the best case scenario for them is that he's still doing this job at 86.

Nobody, I don't think, except maybe the most diluted Biden dead ender,

thinks that he's got four more years of this left in him.

Yeah.

You know, may we all be lucky enough to make it to 86 and may we all be in beautiful, relaxing, you know,

idyllic landscapes with no responsibilities when we do.

Yeah.

May we be in the ocean above coral gables or whatever will be available to

our generation because it ain't going to be the actual physical land of Coral Gables.

At least depending on how this election is going to go.

Don't you wish you'd stayed in Europe?

I'm not sure Europe is that much better, but I guess at least France turned out okay.

Yeah, the French got rid of their Nazis for now.

Well, yeah.

And I mean, so we should do a couple of Europe episodes, I think.

I think it'd be fun to do a France episode.

I also want to do a Poland episode, you know, because the story you're telling about institutional degradation, like they went through all of that.

And they pulled it out.

You now have with Donald Tusk, you know, a government prime minister who is taking pretty bold steps to try and reverse that.

Now, he has the EU sort of as a framework to work with, but it's, I know people in the policy world are looking at it with great interest because it's like, oh, this is the first time someone's really trying to, you know, be like, how do we unwind this?

And it's really kind of interesting.

And there are some fairly obvious lessons there, I think, that Americans and that Joe Biden, frankly, has not been willing to heed.

Like one thing that he does is he does use some of the illiberal powers that his predecessor had taken for himself and uses them to kind of reestablish norms, right?

Like, which I think, you know, that this would argue for something like court packing for something like that.

Be like, I now have

this ability, I have this power.

Okay, let's let's see what we can do with this, right?

And it's, you know, it's tricky, right?

Like it's, it, it doesn't feel very good, but like it's definitely part of his solution.

So I think that, I think that we should do a couple of Europe episodes at some point and think about both how they got there, but also like how

at least some European countries seem to be also offering a kind of way back from that.

That's a nice little happy note to end on.

Yeah, got to do something.

Poland.

Look to Poland, everyone.

All right.

Thank you so much for listening.

And Adrian, thank you for having this conversation with me.

I feel like I learned a lot.

I learned.

I mean, like, thank you for talking about this yet again.

Like,

you poor women are just having to talk about this man and his stubbornness on all media.

You've been listening to In Bed with the Right.

Thank you so much for coming on this journey with us.

Yes, thank you for tuning in.

We'll see you next time.

See you next time.

In Bed with the Right would like to thank the Michelle R.

Clayman Institute for Gender Research for generous support.

Jennifer Portillo for setting up our studio.

Our producer is Katie Lyle.